24,583 Hurt Locker Downloaders Now Face Piracy Suits

Lawyers representing the producers of The Hurt Locker have identified the IP addresses of 24,583 BitTorrent users who downloaded copies of the Oscar-winning movie and plan to sue the owners of those addresses for copyright violations.



According to TorrentFreak.com, which tracks the BitTorrent turf and published the complete list of the 24,584 IP addresses in the complaint. The Hurt Locker case has now emerged as the biggest file-sharing lawsuit ever filed. Of the total, 82 percent are customers of four ISPs Comcast (10,532), Verizon (5,239), Charter (2,699) and Time Warner Cable (1,750). Each of the ISPs has indicated that the process of linking personal information, including names and addresses, to each of the IP addresses will take a considerable amount of time. But the lawyers aren't planning to wait and are planning to send notices to the alleged infringers proposing to settle their cases for $2,000 each. As TorrentFreak observed "If 'only' 10,000 of the alleged infringers eventually pay a $2,000 settlement this would bring in $20 million. In comparison, that's more than the $17 million The Hurt Locker grossed at the U.S. box office."

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